Read Online Raines, Elizabeth - Covert [Wicked Missions 7] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) by Elizabeth Raines - Free Book Online

muscular thigh over her legs while Tanner disappeared into the bathroom. After a few minutes, he crawled back onto the bed and over to her other side. When he flopped down, the mattress jolted enough to make Alayna and Will bounce.
    “Wow.” Tanner wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed her shoulder.
    “My thoughts exactly.” Will gently brushed her tangled hair away from her face. She didn’t have the strength to help him. Every muscle felt like rubber, and she simply couldn’t find the will to move.
    This feeling—this contented and sated feeling—was all she’d ever wanted in life. Sure, they had a rough road ahead of them, one that could last months, even a year or more. But she’d be sharing that ride with two men who were wriggling their ways inside her heart, and she wasn’t sure she knew how to stop them. Love wasn’t an emotion she knew much about. Loyalty, she understood. Dedication. Even courage. But love?
    If she wasn’t so damned tired, Alayna would have given her head a shake at her own stupid sentimentality. This mission was important. Patrile was running rampant through the Rhotan System, and her job was to put a stop to it. Love had nothing to do with it. Her own mission was to not only bring down the patrile makers and smugglers, but to protect these two men who had put their trust in her and had placed their safety in her hands.
    This time, she wouldn’t let her partners down.

Chapter 6

    Four months later…

    Tanner pushed back from his desk and stretched the stiff muscles in his shoulders with an exaggerated roll. Fuck, but he wished he could find time to get in some weight training. His muscles were begging for a workout, but he was pulling so much overtime, he couldn’t even find a break to take a nice long run. Besides, the three of them needed the money the extra time on the clock brought in. Will was taking extra shifts too, as was Alayna. She also had to go out a couple nights a week and waste a lot of what they’d earned. He knew how much that hurt her, and he could see the pain in her eyes each time she kissed them both goodbye as she left for another trip to an interstellar betting parlor or a casino. Appearances had to be kept up, and she was supposed to have a gambling problem. She had to act her part.
    Tanner wasn’t taking their circumstances as well as Will, and he realized he needed to learn to hide his feelings more. Alayna had enough burdens, yet he found himself leaning on her more and more—just like a Fraiquan husband should.
    Perhaps he was a little lost in his role.
    He was also the one who did most of the cooking since he had a way of turning the cheapest pieces of meat, even something as tough and stringy as cheap cuts of prolobeast, into a feast. Money was getting tight, however, and sometimes they had very small portions. Too small, but none of them complained. They weren’t desperate. Yet. But Tanner had made a point of going to get refugee rations twice this week just to let everyone know how poor the Pariago trio truly was.
    The worst thing was that none of them had even been approached by anyone doing anything illegal. They’d done everything they could to let their coworkers know how dire their situation was, both men not-so-subtly complaining about Alayna’s gambling even though it was horribly audacious for males to criticize their female. Since divorce was virtually unheard of on Fraiqua, the people they spent time with had to know there could be other ways of handling their dissatisfaction—hopefully by turning to crime to raise the family’s income.
    Alayna was the only one who’d met Lukasi Arma once before the guy seemed to disappear. The only time Tanner even thought about him now was when he was working on payroll and saw his name pop up. The payments were exorbitant, so the Fraiquan was obviously doing his undercover job well—acting like a smuggler who got payments under the table. When Tanner had made polite and hopefully